Current studies in the Cognitive Neuroscience Section focus on amnesia, neurolinguistics, event-related evoked potentials, social cognition and visual processing. Both single-case and group design studies are used. Normal controls, inpatients and outpatients are evaluated. Memory is studied in experiments focusing on implicit and explicit retrieval, priming, autobiographical recall, discourse processing, naming and word retrieval, and categorization tasks. Reasoning and problem-solving are studied in experiments focusing on planning, syllogisms, analogical thinking, and schema organization. Dyslexia, dysgraphia,and dysnomia, are studied in experiments focusing on single word reading and writing, lexical decision, associative and semantic priming, and similar tasks. Event-related evoked potentials are measured for latency, amplitude, and distribution and used as a physiological indice of information-processing stages, working memory, visual attention, and automatic processing. Emotions, impression and preference formation, and social judgment are studied in experiments focusing on judgment of interpersonal behavior, word association, and mood state. Finally, visual information processing is studied beginning with experiments examining spatial frequency contrast-sensitivity, object recognition, and visual categorization. Although developing theoretically valid and testable models of cognitive processing is the primary aim of the Section, there is also a strong effort to relate the profile of cognitive deficits in patients to lesion location in order to topographically map the components of cognitive processing to brain regions and systems. Pharmacologic challenge and infusion studies are planned to evaluate the dissociability of hypothesized components of memory processing. PET scan studies are planned to examine whether familiar and unfamiliar faces are processed in a different brain location from real and non-objects and forms.